Scarlet Lake

Friday, April 3, 2015

It was a very dull morning when Anirban Konar
encountered the District Magistrate Sumanta Majumdar for the first time.

Late in the previous evening the Leftists Front Govt
was dismissed by the ruling Party at the centre. Though the official decision
was taken by the President, everybody knew that the President, who could be heckled
in his very office by his own party-members for losing his dhoti, was but a
puppet in that God-forsaken country. Years prior or after his Presidential
tenure, all the decisions were actually made by the Party chief and now the
President had to sign on the specified rubber-stamped space. So the arrests of
all the social activists had been duly made, and Anirban was picked up early in
the morning by the police and produced in front of the District Magistrate by mid-morning.

Sumanta was a young and relatively short man in his late
thirties, dark but already balding on both sides of his forehead, and had
piercing sharp eyes. He smiled, “Sorry for the trouble, but you know, I had to
do it; well, I do understand that you guys are not of the same feather as the
so-called Leftists, but I had my orders. By the way, Mr Konar, where can I find
a copy of that book written by Martin Luther King which you used to keep on
your book-shelf?”

Eventually all the seven, including Anirban,
SRC and Asit Poddar were released from the custody after a fortnight, which
turned out to be a hassle-free release altogether and Anirbanwas
too involved to remember to get himself a copy of the book by Martin Luther King.

Two years later they met again in an entirely different
situation.

In a distant village in the district, a group of agricultural
labourers were not paid due to a dispute between the members of a land-owners
family and when the police intervened, they apprehended a few labourers for
agitating against the landlords and demanding to be paid. For Anirban
and his group it was a fit case to raise a hungama in the DM’s office. They
assembled the families of the labourers, a horde numbering around one hundred
and fifty persons inclusive of women and children, in the premises of the
district administrative headquarters and blocked Sumanta Majumdar’s office
door. Soon the smart DM came out for a dialogue and the crowd gheraoed him at
the wide veranda of the old structure of the former British colonial building. Mr
Majumdar was given a chair in the middle of the gathering and made to sit
surrounded by the villagers. Apparently the siege continued quite peacefully
for more than six hours till the reinforcements arrived with their batons and
guns.

The DM, Mr Majumdar, who was sitting pretty until
then, jumped up to stand upon the chair and shouted aloud at the top of his
voice and ordered to stop the progress of the police advancement, as if he had
taken the agitators’ side. The baton charging police force halted and DM took
the opportunity to pacify the situation. It was another pleasant surprise for Anirban;
the arrested labourers were freed without any charges filed against them.

*
* *

It was a semi-dark humid autumn evening during the
height of the extremists’ movement. Carefully avoiding the hassle, Anirban was
passing through the busy and crowded Park Street pavement. He thought it safer in
the up-market locality rather than the empty narrow lanes where he could be
isolated more easily; he was absconding from his residence since the extremist
outfit annihilated a corrupt politician in that locale. All of a sudden, a
forty-something non-descriptive person emerged from nowhere to push Anirban
aside into a corner of and asked if Anirban was using his hideout at Tarakeshwar, a
suburb known for its religious connection.

Astonished by the spontaneity of the incident, Anirban
asked for the identity of the person and questioned about what the relation was
between his staying at Tarakeshwar and walking through Park Street. Sumanta Majumdar’s
smile made Anirbanrecollect. “I’m at the New Secretariat now working in the
department of information. Better you believe me; there’s talk about not arresting
you any more – but ... I hope you know what I mean. Please leave that place, go
somewhere else. The department is tracking every move you make there. Trust me,
and make no mistake ... you never saw me, officially.” And then the former DM vanished
into the darkness as suddenly as he had appeared.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Winter is going through
its last lap; a few more days, and then it will be gone. The mango trees will
become inflorescent and buzzing flies will envelop them. Then millions of tiny
fruits will appear and engulf the branches. Most of them will fall littering
the ground, and eventually something resembling tender mangoes will appear.

There was a time when
children would start pelting the trees with stones rightat that stage. Now that particular
period of childhood has disappeared along with the bittersour taste of tender
mangoes, freshly shot down.

There are very few who
can still remember how exciting it was to write something with a tender mango
seed on a neighbour’s freshly whitewashed wall. It was like writing with an
invisible ink; when you give the first stroke, it would be marked like water,
and then evaporate. Only afterwards would the angry neighbour notice the brown
letters emerge.

Slowly and
gradually the writing would become prominent and darker by the passing day. To
the utter disappointment of the owner of the wall, there would remain no option
for him other than a repaint, to be rid of thisvandalism. Nor was he able to catch
the culprit, who would have long disappeared right after writing the slogan.
Perhaps the most hostile and the ugliest part of it was the kind of graffiti
that would resurface from underneath in a few days even after a repaint.

Well, it was not
like the boys would ever want to be caught red-handed. So in most of the cases
the slogans used were some iteration of “His-name + Her-name”. A few
excellent surfaces for such anonymous “Blog-Posts” were the buildings that
still under construction. There was less chance of getting caught and
building’s newly cemented walls were so much smoother than the old houses.

There was local youth, a
rail-company draftsman, who was asked by a renowned property developer of a
suburb to produce a grand plan for a new school building for the local girls’
school. He did it meticulously well, being his first professional assignment as
a building planner. In his Rail Company he was never given such a big
responsibility.

The old and abandoned
zamindarbari was already was in use as a temporary set up for the school and
was brought for a pittance by the promoter, but it was pulled down part by part,
piece by piece and the school’s routine also rearranged in a similar fashion.
It was a promoter’s first experience in both construction and as contractor and
it took a fairly long time. Small children enjoyed these long holidays more
than ever, but the middle school girls had to share the same classrooms for an
amalgamation of subjects.

Two sisters, one smart of
whitish complexion and the other, darker, shy were getting late returning home
one evening, being from a different locality as they were. The forced holidays
brought intercollege boys an unexpected opportunity to flirt with them. In a
dusky forthcoming evening, two youths stood at both sides of the only road,
stretching a skipping string to its ends, blocking the sisters’ way. The
girls in sarees, could neither jump the line nor was there left any room to
bypass the boys. The younger and smarter one ducked and passed, smiling
meaningfully to the boy on the right. But the shy, elder sister stood there
confused, clutching her books tightly to her chest and with tears in her eyes.
The boy on the left had to loosen his end and let her go without much to say.

In the course of the next
three years, their father gave his younger daughter’s hand in marriage to that
flirty bright young man who had become a graduate and joined a merchant firm by
then. But the shy elder sister had a fiancé who did not pass the exams and
remained unemployed. Her marriage was then arranged with a suitable man in a
different township, leaving him.

Eventually the school building
was raised up to two storeys, but the doors and window shutters were still
missing. One morning, the class-teacher of the junior section had found
“Her-name + His-name” written with tender mango seeds all over the school’s
bare walls; this was the fiancé’s last attempt to stall the marriage.

But it did not work, the
girl was gone. She had disappeared just as a shadow melts into the darkness
when the light evaporates at the day’s end and the writing on the wall was
whitewashed.

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As a professional artist Manoj knows that a picture is worth a thousand words; thus he writes pictures.
He has authored three books and a collection of poems, 'The Hues of Red' is available at amazon.in. He's also the author of 'Anyone Can Learn Art', a highly appreciated book on the basics and fundamentals of drawing and painting.